The texts in French and Polish have better time stamps than the others because they were constructed by expert subtitlers (thanks, François and Peter) who built files designed for use by subtitling software. These two languages will be of more use for designing additional subtitled versions. I have an .ssa file from the French version for anyone who needs it; email unspiek@chromatism.net if you want a copy.

If any more languages arrive in my inbox — there are three or four still unaccounted for — I will post them here and also add them to the new master file.

Many thanks to everyone who assisted with the Rosetta Stone project. I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to see an effort like this come together according to plan, work like it’s supposed to, and generate a result that is useful to people.

We’re all part-time volunteers, but our combined labor produces something that couldn’t otherwise have been obtained in such a short time without paying a lot of money.

As of this post, all the translations of Fitna that I have on hand are now available online at Gates of Vienna. Earlier installments are here, here, here, and here. Today I have added Tagalog, Russian, and Polish, bringing the total to eighteen languages plus English.

In case you don’t know what Tagalog is, it’s the language in the Philippines that has the largest number of speakers. As of the year 2000 there were an estimated 22 million native Tagalog speakers in the islands. Since the Philippines suffers from a permanent and deadly Muslim insurgency in Mindanao and some of the smaller islands, making the film Fitna available with subtitles in Tagalog is obviously a worthwhile task.

Last Friday the Finnish TV network YLE published the following brief news item:

Blogger Fined for Inciting Racial Hatred

A blogger in Finland has been fined for writing offensive material about Africans.

A court sentenced the 30-year old Espoo resident to a fine for inciting racial hatred. It found that the man’s writings on the Internet constituted illegal propaganda.

The judgment ruled that the man slandered Africans by comparing them to animals. In his defense, the man said that laws governing freedom of speech protected his right to express his opinion.

Inciting racial hatred — hets mot folkgrupp in the Swedish version — is the catchall offense used in Finland to suppress politically incorrect speech.

The blogger thought he was protected by the right of free speech, but he was mistaken. With the possible exception of Denmark, freedom of speech does not exist in any European country. The right to speak freely is subordinate to the right to practice one’s religion freely, and to be free of racial discrimination. Both of these “rights” are conveniently used to suppress anyone who questions Orthodox Multiculturalism.

The story doesn’t mention the name of the blogger, but he is in fact Mikko Ellilä.

The legal process against him started with a summons to talk to the police. After that it looked like nothing much might happen, and there were some among our commenters who claimed we were making a lot of fuss about nothing, and that Mr. Ellilä was bound to be released.

But it didn’t work out that way. The matter was referred to the State Prosecutor, who brought the case to trial, and Mr Ellilä was convicted. It’s the second such case in Finland, and will draw the iron curtain of censorship down even tighter over Finnish anti-immigration blogs and websites.

Another aspect to the case, is whether he should have been forced by a court to have to explain his views at all. The Finnish State Prosecutor’s line of questioning: “what was your intent”, should send a chill up everyone’s spine, no matter what the issue is about. This scaling back of liberal freedoms — if it isn’t overturned by a higher court — comes at a crucial time when civil liberties are under attack by those who want to limit what one can say about Islam.

Turkkilaista tuumintaa has major portions of the trial transcript translated into English. KGS includes a caveat that Matias Turkkila made his partial transcript from notes rather than a tape recording, so word-for-word accuracy is not to be expected.

Here’s a random excerpt:

[Defense attorney Kari] Silvennoinen: One of the offences mentioned in the preliminary investigation was that you had compared ethnic groups to animals. Is this the case?

Ellilä: No. I haven’t compared any ethnic groups to animals. I merely stated that man — as in mankind — is an animal, homo sapiens, which is of course a fact known to everyone.

Silvennoinen: How about the word “parasite”, which you use at one point?

Ellilä: In Finland, the word “parasite” [“loinen”] was originally a socio-economic term used in 19th century agrarian society, where terms such as “peasant”, “tenant farmer”, “parasite” etc. were used, this last group being people who lived at the expense of others. It was only later that this word came to be used of lice and other insects, and it’s still used colloquially in the socio-economic sense in political discourse, in newspaper columns and such. It’s not the kind of word that politicians would use, but then, I am not a politician, but a private citizen.

Silvennoinen: Did you have any intentions of inciting or offending?

Ellilä: None whatsoever. [emphasis added]

Notice that Mikko Ellilä’s defense comes down to what he intended. As it happens, such a defense proved inadequate — evidently the court determined that Mr. Ellilä’s intentions were not benign, and ruled accordingly.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Mikko Ellilä’s inner thoughts and intentions are in fact vile. Let’s pretend that he really thinks that Africans are no better than animals, that Jews are sub-humans, and the Suomi-speakers of Finland are the most evolved race on the planet.

So what?

I would find such opinions repugnant. I would decline to read his writings, and I would give his theories no credence.

But that’s not the issue.

The issue is this: Freedom of speech means the absolute right to say truly repugnant things.

Otherwise it has no meaning. If we are only free to say “The Emperor’s clothes are gorgeous and delightful,” then we have no free speech whatsoever.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

It’s also the original version of the movie (with Turban Bomb), so the copyright question is still an issue.

LiveLeak includes this announcement:

On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film “fitna” from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don’t consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted.

Thanks to TB for the tip.

Geert Wilders will be releasing a revised version of Fitna. According to ANSAMed:

Author Cuts Anti-Koran Film to Avoid Legal Actions

Scared by the legal consequences of his anti-Islam film, Dutch extreme-right MP and author of the controversial film ‘Fitna’, Geert Wilders, decided to cut some scenes of his work to defend himself from eventual legal actions already threatened by Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, author of the caricatures of Mohammed which inflamed part of the Islamic world and appear now in the film too.

Wilders cut the scene with the caricature of the Islamic prophet with a bomb hidden under his turban and replaced it with a similar drawing, after Westergaard threatened to take him to court for violation of author’s rights.

Fitna’s director will also replace the photography of Moroccan-Dutch rapper, Salah Edin, with an image of Mahomet Bouyeri, the killer of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, in order to avoid being charged by the singer, who has appeared as associated with the murder of Van Gogh. (ANSAmed).

The big question is: Where will the new version of the movie be released? What venue will accept it?

It seems unlikely that LiveLeak will put itself at risk a second time. So what hosting service will risk a fatwa and take on the dreaded and provocative hate-movie?

The public celebration of the birth of Mohammed is known as Mawlid, and was celebrated this year on March 20th or March 25th, under the Sunni or Shi’a traditions respectively.

But the Muslims of America, the front group for Jamaat ul-Fuqra, are celebrating the event on Saturday in downtown Binghamton, New York. Binghamton is the nearest large town to Deposit, which — as regular readers already know — is the home of Islamberg, the national headquarters of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, the followers of the Sheikh Gilani.

Maybe the difference in date is due to the fact that the sheikh and his disciples are Sufis, and not Sunnis or Shi’ites. According to The Press & Sun-Bulletin:

Downtown event to mark prophet’s birthday

The Muslims of the Americas group intends to celebrate the prophet Muhammad’s birthday in downtown Binghamton.

The community traditionally observed Milad-un-Nabi (celebration of the Holy Prophet) with a parade, singing and other activities at its privately owned property in Hancock, where 35 to 40 Muslim families live.

One of the ways you can tell this celebration is from a Pakistan-based group is that they call it Milad an-Nābi (Urdu) rather than Mawlid an-Nābi (Arabic). If the organization were an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, it would almost certainly refer to the occasion as Mawlid.

This year, though, the group wants to expand the celebration to include a parade and other activities from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday in downtown Binghamton.

“We’re trying to do an interfaith thing, we’re reaching out to the community to do a program based on unity,” said Maryam A. Rahim, event coordinator. “We haven’t been very well known … We want everyone to come out and celebrate, maybe ask questions.”

The first-ever celebration of Muhammad’s birthday in Binghamton will include a parade starting at 11 a.m. on Court Street from Chenango to Front streets and then back to Chenango Street. One lane of downtown’s main street will be closed during the parade, said city spokesman Andrew Block, who also said the group secured the appropriate permits to hold the celebration.

After the parade, activities are scheduled in front of the old Broome County Court-house. The list of guest speakers includes the Rev. Douglas Taylor of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Binghamton and Diane O’Heron, a professor at Broome Community College.

Rahim said within the Muslim community, some adherents disagree with a formal celebration of Muhammad’s birthday, claiming it is excess and not in keeping with the prophet’s modest lifestyle.

Others consider the observance of Milad-un-Nabi to be just as important as Eid-ul-Fitr, which is the celebration after the fasting month of Ramadan, and Eid-ul-Adha, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, she said.

Everyone should pay attention to the sanitized history of MOA given in the next paragraph, which must have been pulled from the group’s press release or PR website and published in the newspaper without any checking or further research:

Muslims of the Americas was formed in the 1980s when several families migrated from ghetto properties in New York City to Hancock to make a new start on their own property in a clean, rural environment, Rahim said. The community includes a mosque and a private school.

There’s a little bit more to MOA than that, including a history of gun-running, money laundering, welfare fraud, firebombings, and murder.

Check our sidebar listings at the left for extensive background information on MOA and Jamaat ul-Fuqra, or visit The Politics of CP. An informed citizenry is the bastion of democracy.

In this post are four additional translations of the screenplay for Fitna: Romanian, Norwegian, Croatian, and Bulgarian. This brings our list of languages up to fifteen in addition to English. I’m expecting (hoping for) several more.

Once again, I’m very grateful for the response from our volunteer translators.

The viral spread continues. The most recent addition that I know of is Fitna with Farsi subtitles, intended for what will presumably be an enormous demand in Iran. The mullahs may be forced to close all the internet cafes to keep the blasphemous Dutchman from corrupting Persia’s youth.